Be Prepared!

The motto of the Boy Scout movement is said to have been based on the initials of its founder, Robert Baden-Powell, who became a national hero after the relief of the besieged garrison at Mafeking in the Boer War. (In November 1899, the Westminster Gazette had reported ominously, "Colonel Baden-Powell and his gallant garrison will have to keep their end up unassisted.") Wild scenes of rejoicing greeted news of the relief, and as well as lodging Baden-Powell in the national consciousness, Mafeking had an impact on the language with the humorous coining by the Press of the verb maffick, meaning to celebrate noisily and extravagantly.

Today we are likely to think of Baden-Powell in association with others who saw principles instilled in youth as key to the formation of character: the world of Henry Newbolt's account of military disaster ("the Gatling's jammed and the colonel's dead") in which, "The voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks, Play up! play up! and play the game!" It is a world of unquestioned verities rather than expediency, in which the colonial administrator Lord Milner could say in a speech of 1909, "If we believe a thing to be bad, and if we have a right to prevent it, it is our duty to try to prevent it and to damn the consequences."

Newbolt's poem implies that values acquired in one's schooldays are the key to character, and through that to success in life, but Baden-Powell himself pointed to an earlier influence. In his autobiographical Lessons from the Varsity of Life (1933) he wrote, "The whole secret of my getting on lay with my mother."

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